1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printer driver.
2. Description of the Related Art
In business operations for printing a large amount of forms with a high-end printer, individual variable print data such as customer information including a name, an address, a sum of money and a bar-code is embedded in the respective forms, and a plurality of predetermined forms are combined to create form data (print job) which is one purpose of the printing operation.
The formats of the forms are determined in advance, and various formats of forms are prepared in accordance with the purpose of the printing operation.
When printing such form data, a particular part of the form may be printed onto a “a particular type of paper sheet (e.g., a color sheet) that is specified for the form”, a banner page or a slip sheet may be inserted between print jobs to separate the entire data of a particular form and the entire data of another particular form, a separation sheet may be inserted so that a bundle of forms is easily identified in terms of a particular range (for example, in units of areas or in units of individuals) in the form data, or a particular sheet may be replaced with another sheet that has already been printed.
When printing forms with the use of a printer driver described below, the above printing operations can be implemented by combining print settings of the entire document and exceptional settings.
Other than a function of making print settings for the entire document, a printer driver has a function of specifying exceptions (exceptional settings) of print settings, so that some pages such as pages having different sheet sizes can be printed according to different specifications from those of the print settings for the entire document.
In the exceptional settings, sheet attributes such as sheet size may be changed for each page, single-sided printing and double-sided printing may be combined, a plurality of logical pages may be arranged in one physical page, monochrome printing and color printing may be combined, banner pages, slip sheets, and separation sheets may be inserted, and a particular sheet may be replaced with another sheet that has already been printed.
To make exceptional specifications of print settings, the following types of print drivers are already known. Specifically, there is a print driver that can use different print settings for different sheet sizes of documents. Furthermore, there is a print driver that can specify exceptions for each page range. Furthermore, there is a print driver that can extract a common part of render instruction information of the respective pages, perform matching on the common part of render instruction information with a template of render instruction information stored in advance, and use the print setting information associated with the matched template information, so that printing conditions can be easily applied without making complex settings at the user interface for print settings.
Patent document 1 discloses the following printing technology. Specifically, the purpose of the printing technology is to provide a print setting control device/control method/program capable of easily applying print conditions, without making complex settings at the user interface for print settings. The printing technology involves associating “template information” indicating render instruction information common to the pages with “print setting information”, extracting render instruction information common to the pages of a document, and executing printing with the use of “print setting information” corresponding to the template information when the extracted render instruction information and the “template information” match. That is to say, the printer driver specifies whether to apply the “print setting information” corresponding to the “template information”, and when the printer driver receives a print instruction request from the OS (Operating System), it is determined whether there is a specification at this printer driver. When there is no specification, regular printing is executed with the use of “print setting information set at the print driver”. When there is a specification, printing is executed with the use of a print setting corresponding to “render instruction information common to the pages”, and when there is no print setting corresponding to “render instruction information common to the pages”, regular printing is executed with the use of “print setting information set at the print driver”.
However, in the conventional printer driver, when print settings can be made for the respective sheet sizes of documents, the following problem arises. That is to say, when exceptional settings are made, such as inserting banner pages, slip sheets, and separation sheets, or replacing a particular sheet with another sheet that has already been printed, it may not be possible to attain the expected print output results by associating the exceptional settings with the print settings for each sheet size. Therefore, a separate exception specification needs to be made for the corresponding pages.
Furthermore, when specifying exceptions for each page range, if the order of pages changes when the document data is edited after specifying a page range by the printer driver, it is necessary to specify the page range again by manual input in consideration of the document that has been changed by the printer driver.
A printer driver, which applies print conditions by using print setting information associated with template information, extracts the common part of the render instruction information of the respective pages, performs matching on the common part of render instruction information with a template of render instruction information stored in advance, and uses the print setting information associated with the matched template information.
Thus, in the page range matching the template information, the print setting associated with the template information can be applied. However, when exceptional settings are made, such as inserting banner pages, slip sheets, and separation sheets, or replacing a particular sheet with another sheet that has already been printed, or not printing a particular page, it may not be possible to attain the expected print output results, unless a separate exception specification is made for the corresponding pages.
Furthermore, the print setting associated with the template information is applied, and therefore the print settings set for the document data is overwritten by the print settings associated with the template information. Accordingly, detailed print settings cannot be made for each page.    Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent No. 4539975